Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday July 15, 2011 @04:50PM
from the stop-pretending-this-adds-value-for-customers dept.

Joining the likes of THQ, Electonic Arts, and Sony, Ubisoft has now announced plans to launch the "Uplay Passport," a $10 fee charged to buyers of used games if they want to play them online. They say the program "will begin in the coming months and will be included in many of Ubisoft's popular core games. In each new copy of a Uplay Passport-enhanced game will be a one-time use registration code that, when redeemed, provides access to Uplay Passport content and features. The code can be found on the insert card inside the game box. Gamers can identify Uplay Passport-enhanced games by looking for the logo on the back of the box."

Where have YOU been? Everyone who cares at all has been avoiding them like the clap since the "Hey lets make them have an always on connection for single player!" DRM bullshit. the hilarious part is something like 3 weeks after that BS the "Reloaded" edition hit P2P where they managed to completely bypass their BS. Just goes to show you DRM only bites paying customers.

Now as for TFA if the ONLY thing it does is require payment for a used game to play MP? I really don't care. After all they are gonna have to

Same games publisher to avoid. Ubisoft has been the very worst in the industry when it comes to things like invasive DRM, requiring always-on internet connections and the like. If you get a burp in your connectivity (hope you're not playing on wi-fi), the game dies. Hope you saved.

They don't even disable their evil DRM on Steam, which itself is pretty good.

Shame, too. Some of their games look fun. But when I see that Ubisoft is the publisher of a game, I refuse to bu

It may be just grumpy-old-guy syndrome, but in spite of the cmoparatively crap graphics, the old 1990's era games were a lot more fun to play (yes, bugs and all). The reason why have to do with elements that have little to do with the technical:

* Most of the old games (Quake/II/III, Unreal/UT, Half-Life, etc) were devilishly customizable, and the software companies actually encouraged modifications* With only a few games of a given genre, you had a *lot* more players* dial-up may have sucked, but it did equalize the field by quite a bit (everyone had lag to some extent) - OTOH, this is obviously more of a bandwidth thing and not a game design thing.* the good games back then were more concerned about flow and content, and less concerned about "balance" or graphics* most of the games were hosted and played freely online, not kept behind a pay-gate* Some folks complain about bots and griefers back in the old days, but hell, they're just as common now as they were back then, if not moreso... just that the cheats are more subtle now, and the greifers less so.* nobody gave a crap if you 'pirated' or copied the game, because odds were very good that you'd buy the next iteration when it came out (see also id Software)

Only opinion, but I'm blaming around 2000-2001 as the time when gaming began declining. CD Keys were only the barest hint of the DRM to come. More and more games got shoved into pay-for-play mode. The flood of games meant a growing fragmentation (even among folks playing the same title... You had Unreal Tournament, UT 2003, UT 2004, etc... all running w/ players at the same time). LAN parties became less and less common, and the ones still going only meant that there were UT players, Quake players, BF 1942 players, CS players, etc... and each new game or iteration meant less folks in a given LAN that could play a given game (or that wanted to, instead preferring their own game/version).

Sure, the consoles kept things going for awhile, but IMHO (and nothing more), it only pushed game publishers down paths that meant more DRM, higher prices, and pay-to-play online experiences. Not even going to touch on the remakes/reboots/re-whatevers that means the majority of games coming out are some re-iteration of something you've already played before.

Certainly, there are bright spots in this dark prose... games that stood out and demanded attention, and/or broke new ground (games like GTA). That said, most of the big ones just became more fodder for sequels, each not quite as good as the last.

(I'm largely joking, though I do like those old games... I see Amazon has a buy 2 get 1 free game sale for some games I'm interested in, so I will likely stock up on some more even before I have a PS3! Also, I've never had a Nintendo system, but one of the reas

I built my own arcade machine specifically for Mr. Do! (though with MAME, I clearly didn't stop with just one game). It's always interesting to see somebody else know that relatively obscure game that's like dig dug with a snowball.:D

Well, that's a simplistic way of looking at it, but the point is, You dig, much like dig dug. Instead of blowing guys up, you just hit them with.. what I assume is a snow ball. Ok ok, but you're a clown. So it's different.. but you get it.

And, yes, Mr Do! is obscure- at least more so than most arcade games. Very few of my friends know of it. I only know of it cause I grew up near an pizza place with mr do! and I pretty much spent my allowance on it every week.

I had way more fun with Team Fortress 2, Battlefield 2, and Left 4 Dead than I ever did with Quake or Unreal. Warcraft 3 and Company of Heroes and Starcraft 2 are absolutely better than their predecessors.

Game makers have gotten smarter and design their games with better mechanics. TF2 and L4D, for example, have exceptionally well-balanced asymmetrical modes. Weapon and ability variety has increased tremendously. Map design has become more objective. Frustration factors have been reduc

I was going to write a long involved comment on it but I think it's better put this way:

$22,733 - this is how much it would have cost me to buy what I have for my Xbox (including the cost of the xbox and accessories) had I not bought it used.

Somehow I don't think my $60/month budget for gaming would cover that... unless they wanted to wait 31 years. They've priced themselves out of their own market and rather than dropping prices so people can actually afford to buy the games new they're trying to impose a

Beyond the DRM bullshit (there really is no other word), the gaming industry is suffering from the Disney movie effect. They just keep making sequels or remaking the same. Newer Unreals were the same game as previous ones just with better graphics. It was no more exciting than Aladdin 23 or Parent Trap 9 (or what ever Disney is up to now). When the games differed in more than new graphics they added extra complexity to the game that just didn't add anything to the game play. Many argue that the playabi

Man, I'm 31 and to me Doom/Quake were when games stopped being fun. I grew up in a world without First Person Shooters and never really got into them. I suppose we all just like what we liked when we were kids, and I'm sure in 20 years time when consoles plug directly into your brain today's children will be moaning about how the new stuff isn't as much fun as Halo 2 was.

At the risk if sounding really old one of the issues I have with many modern games are the complicated controls. Gamepads have hundreds of

Not to mention virtual target practice isn't really that fun. I enjoyed older games because there was real strategy involved. It was more than just the superficial point and shoot crapstorm games are today.

I've been gaming since the Pong days, and I couldn't disagree more. I am consistently impressed with the innovative games coming out today. Does the DRM suck? You bet. Are there a lot of sequels? Yep. But 90% of everything is crap and always has been. But that 10% includes some truly, truly amazing stuff. Back in the day, I couldn't have even imagined something as amazing as open world games like Oblivion, Fallout 3, L.A. Noire, etc. I couldn't have even imagined MMO's like WoW, Eve Online, Rift, etc.

No, it's not. It's free for ONE PERSON who uses that new copy of the game. Let's say you you're underage and have siblings? Or you have a spouse who games? Or maybe you have roommates or live in a sort of "house of dudes"? Having to pay another $10 for each person to be allowed to play (not to mention, possibly charging separately for each piece of DLC *per person*, depending on the particular piece of DLC in question) is bullshit.

Imagine if you bought Monopoly at the store for $10. You set it out and got t

If you're gaming in a communal environment, for games like this, use a public sign-in for the whole house. Everyone's pleased. This isn't rocket science. I already do it myself between me and my wife, so I know that this does work. And no, they're not short-changing the primary customer. They're short-changing the secondary customer, and I honestly couldn't care less for the secondary customer as I don't buy used games nor sell the ones I have and have also planned ahead when the concept of DLC came to frui

With gamesaves on a local drive, I don't see that happening. With cloud stored gamesaves, I only see that possibly happening if the data is stored on the publisher's servers. Even with XBL moving so that a gamertag lives solely in the cloud, your data is still going to be on Microsoft's servers and rather difficult for a publisher to get their hands on and edit.

As long as idiots pay the money the publishers will keep taking their cut. As long as customers keep saying "I don't like it, but I just got to have the game" then this will keep happening. As Liberace said, "I'm laughing all the way to the bank."

That's the thing. If they were providing any value for the money it probably would work, but as it is they're taking away value unless you pay them $10.

There's all sorts of services they could provide that would be worth $10 to the consumer without costing them $10 to provide. And yet they go the lazy route and just raise prices on their games. Hardly as brazen as the 60% that Netflix managed, but it's still pretty insulting to suggest that they're entitled to something for nothing.

Seriously, I think this is good - as long as it's clearly marked on the box/digital 'packaging' so that people can make informed choices, let them. They'll lose customers, they'll also gain revenue - and they (and the market) can decide in the end if the revenues gained from second-hand sales make up for the revenue lost in first-hand sales.

I think it will more than do so - most people are basically inconsiderate in the end. If they get their gameplay out of it, they're really not going to worry about wh

I think it will more than do so - most people are basically inconsiderate in the end. If they get their gameplay out of it, they're really not going to worry about what the second-hand purchaser is getting when they go to gamestop to make their trade-ins.

There's a selfish motive for not buying games you can't resell at a high price. If I buy a $50 and resell it at $30, I've only spent $20 in that transaction. If I buy a $50 game and can only resell it at $10, I've spent $40. In either case I get the sam

I dunno, I think Angry Birds causes more frustration for people than enjoyment. No one believed me when I told them I'd beaten the original, Rio, and almost finished Seasons because most people find them so hard to complete the more challenging levels.

That all makes sense. But take it a step further down the chain.
"I suspect we'll see the second hand games resellers lowering both their purchase and resale price for these games over time." That means that people who buy the game new will get less for their trade-ins. Not everyone trades games in, but that will yield a lower average value to the new game since some proportion of the buyers counted on defraying the purchase price with a trade-in. That will yield lower sales and/or lower prices on new game

If the resale price goes down, then less people will be willing to buy the game new. As they will have less of that resale money to spend. They will lose customers and revenue. I now know to avoid them, but I don't buy games when they first come out anyway. On the other hand I do tend to buy the first version and the GOTY editions of really good games. I just wait until those products are available at the reasonable price or get them used. They need to realize they are not only competing with new games but

Except that prices don't really go down. They go down much faster in retail stores than in online stores. Eliminating the middle man of the retail stores just means they pocket the difference, they will not pass that on to the customers (well, Steam is a new middle man here too, taking their own cut). So I can get cheaper games retail AND give them away to a friend when I'm done (legally!) OR play the game a decade after the publisher has gone bankrupt.

The nice thing about Steam is that everyone knows you have no resale, so (admittedly, sale) prices reflect that. Most people wouldn't care if they couldn't resell their console games if they sold for $15-20 instead of $60.

With a vow to never spend over $15 and some patience (maybe as long as a couple of years), there is no reason why you can't get any game on there for cheap as hell. Usually by waiting for a major holiday.

However, for non-sale prices, Amazon (new and used) is usually cheaper, sooner.

I rarely if ever will spend more than $5 on a game from Steam. The only exceptions have been when the alternative was buying from somebody I hated even more than Valve and didn't have the patience to wait for the price to drop to next to nothing. In practice that's happened like twice.

This is backwards. If there are inexpensive second hand sales this will drive down the costs of the first-sale products to match. Games are cheaper on Steam only when they're older, and even then it seems to take much longer for games to fall into the $9.99 bargain bin prices on Steam than they do in a brick and mortar store. Competition should reduce costs overall, which is why publishers strive to eliminate competition so that they can keep the profits high.

But a lot of them DO sell for that. Greatest Hits get down to the $20 level.. and as I mentioned in another thread, there's an Amazon sale of buy 2 get 1 free. There were some $20 or less games there too, so if you can find 3 you want, that's effectively $13.33/game.

Steam doesn't allow a secondary market; that is true. But they make up for it by selling games much, much, cheaper than other retailers (I don't have figures, but I assume that their deeply discounted games greatly outsell the others). The ability to resell a game has a value to me. If you discount the new game by an amount greater than the amount of the resale value, I will happily prefer buying your cheaper, but non-resealable version. Go low enough and nobody cares about buying used either since nobody buys a used game because they prefer used to new; they buy used because it's cheaper. The losers are the stores that specialize in reselling used games since they can no longer profit off of arbitrage.

Steam has one of the highest prices I have EVER seen. They drop them not that often, so you can buy some older games for still full price. And well... each new one goes for around 50-60€, while local retailer will sell it for around 15-30€ - boxed! Even if Steam puts something on sale its still often more expensive than my local retailers, tho I must admit sometimes its cheaper or shipping costs and me having to watch for mail makes Steam a bit more convenient. But overall its very expensive, espe

I figure that your retailers match their price to earnings of their customers, so it could be hard to find something as cheap as here. Problem with Steam is that (from what I can tell) they have the same price for everyone in Europe. If new games for PC would be priced at 50-60€ at retail in Poland, then almost no one would buy. There are people here who need to live out of 300€ a month, and families with 3+kids that have "just" 600€ in total. 30€ for a game is already a hefty price + ha

Granted, you lose the ability to sell your games, but you get a lot in return. Install on many machines, including at work, laptop, desktop, etc. You can only play one at a time, but thats ok, and fair within the idea of buying "a" game.

You can forget about losing the disk, or scratching it. Installing is pretty painless and reasonably quick. They have great sale prices if you shop a bit. You can still play games many years after you buy them (I'm playing games I bought in 99, ie: HL1, TFC, which was e

Steam isn't perfect true. It's also evil. DRM should be boycotted by anyone with a brain who does not want to give away their rights merely because they're drooling over a game. It's not as restrictive a DRM as some other places, but it is still DRM and they have control over the game you paid money for. They're not doing this to stop piracy, but to stop second hand sales which is a right you should have as a consumer. But most people don't care because they no longer think about owning a game anymore

Yes. It's sneaky, get people to object over "bad" DRM and have the cozy up to "good" DRM and even go so far as to defend the DRM. To some people Steam is convenient so they conveniently overlook the fact that their rights are being removed. As long as a publisher has a game that someone wants, you can make them jump over flaming hoops to get it.

I lend quite often. It's called I switch my password to something temporary to let a buddy play, or just signin once to their machine, download the game, and put the hack on to put Steam into permanent offline mode on their machine.

That's ok, i couldn't care less about their TOS. Hell, my friend and I share a steam account (about 200 games now), and we just D/L the game, and the go into offline mode. Have never had a problem with it, and we get to share each others games. As for multiplayer, I never buy a single player game for the multiplayer aspects. That is what MMOs are for, they do much better at it. I am loving steam ever since i bought Half-Life 2 years ago. Many of the older games and MMOs dont even require steam to work

you are right and Valve's ToS is draconian. It's new technology and no laws are in place for it yet, which I hope there will be soon. Until then I create a new account for each game that I buy, so I can easily sell or lend games to other people.

And I would rather have ponies and be surrounded by buxom blondes, but we have deal with the system we have. DRM free games are a pipe dream, unless you don't mind only playing ancient games from GOG.com, or freeware, open source crap

>>DRM free games are a pipe dream, unless you don't mind only playing ancient games from GOG.com, or freeware, open source crap

Ooh... shouldn't have gone there on Slashdot. =)

Even though it's kind of weird to say it, console games are more "free" (as in protection of first sale doctrine rights, not as in beer) than PC games these days. For a long time now, retail copies of PC games come with a one-time code to register it online, and once you've registered your copy of, say, Diablo II, nobody else can

I bought Batman:Arkham Asylum GOTY with all DLC for $5 from Steam. It has been at this price point at least 3 times. This version also includes free re-downloads at any time i wish and no disk to store (technically no individual disk to store, i still keep a physical backup of all steam games on my backup HDD). I dont need , nor want a physical manual, box or disk.

Most I have discussed this with have talked about this being their last "console generation" if even half of them follow through and go back to pc gaming how do you think the publishers are going to explain away lost sales. Back when I was still console gaming a few years ago I would occasionally buy used games and when good they usually enticed me to buy the next title when it was released. Most that I know that buy used do so because they aren't willing to pay $60 for a game so they wait until it hits a

Seriously, do companies need to profit on everything we do? They're as bad as the government. Tax when you get paid, taxes on the things you bought, taxes on the money you give, taxes on money you save, taxes on property you own. A single dollar gets taxed for like 50% of it.
Gaming companies are trying to do the same! Pay money when you buy the game(I support that) Pay money to keep playing it (I understand it, content updates, servers, you know, mmo stuff) but now money when you sell it to someone else?

I wont touch a ubisoft game because of their retarded DRM stuntsfuck sonyTHQ? what do they make aside from crap wrestling and movie games, and the occasional total shit port to another system (road rash 64 pops to mind)

And yes EA I am still pissed that nearly 10 years ago I bought Tiger Woods Golf for my pretty new palm 5 (and it was a great game), but you stole from me around 6 months later. (there is a cd key but it does not work with the game, you go to a long dead website, enter that seed, and get the c

Whether this movement is a good thing depends on one major factor: the price of used games.

If, because used games have less value thanks to not being able to go online, resellers drop prices, then I actually like the idea a lot. For me, who doesn't give a shit about most multiplayer components in games, I'd much rather get a single player-only game for cheaper. Mark down the prices by ten bucks and let me decide whether I'll get the MP component or not. In fact, that kind of modularity would be nice even at

Uplay hacked and now redundant as using the hack is undetectable as they can't tell the legitimate from the illegitimate codes.
Queue restart of used games market. It is kind of like having a stick with a carrot on the end of it except your stick can be hacked:P

used products but as someone who has multiple XBL accounts in the house. I'm not paying the publishers extra money just because my son, my daughter and I like to have separate achievements. Figured this out when I went to play the latest NFS... worse, I own it on my PC but there's no way to go, "Hey, I own two copies of this, let me play!"

Fuck the people who do this. The games are already shoddy pieces of crap which are unimaginative, buggy, and overpriced - now you want more? I'll just stop buying - for